Digital video products and services and devices for storage and retrieval of video streams on the Internet are ubiquitous in the marketplace. Due to limitations in digital signal storage capacity and limitations in network and broadcast bandwidth, compression of digital video signals is essential to digital video storage and transmission. As a result, many standards for compression and encoding of digital video signals have been promulgated. These standards specify with particularity the form of encoded digital video signals and how such signals are to be decoded for presentation to a viewer.
One example of such a standard is the ISO/IEC international Standard 13818 (generally referred to as MPEG-2 format) created by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and is described in ITU-T Recommendation H.262, ISO/IEC 13818-2: 1996 Information technology—Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio—Part 2: Video, which document is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Although the MPEG-2 standard specifies a general coding methodology and syntax for generating an MPEG-2 compliant bitstream, many variations are permitted to accommodate a plurality of different applications and services such as desktop video publishing, video conferencing, digital storage media, and television broadcast. Thus, MPEG-2 allows significant discretion as to how the digital video signals are to be transformed from a native, uncompressed format to the specified encoded format. In other words, encoding steps are not rigidly defined allowing tradeoffs between video quality, compression ratio, and compute power of the encoder. As a result, many different digital video signal encoders currently exist and many approaches are used to encode digital video signals.
Various noise artifacts associated with MPEG video signals are known in the art. One example of such a noise artifact is referred to as “mosquito” noise. Mosquito noise results around the sharp edges of images that results from attenuation of high frequency transform coefficients. The mosquito noise artifact is an effect in which it seems that a cloud of mosquitos appear around an object. Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for detecting and reducing mosquito noise in MPEG video systems.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.